Tickled Pink
It’s a bright, humid day in late summer and the rosebay willowherb is up to my chin. It rained earlier in the day, and now the air is heavy and close as it evaporates. It’s been about an hour and the mushrooms are starting to work.
Rosebay willowherb is a ruderal plant. This means it grows first on wasteland, broken ground, demolished buildings. In the Southeast they call it ‘Bombweed’, because of the way it sprung up in the rubble left behind by the Luftwaffe. Its flowers are a spear tip of bright pink at the top of a single stem. You’ve seen them before. They are the foodplant of the Elephant Hawk Moth, one of the most beautiful moths in the country. It too is pink, though not the same shade — a more soft, pastel pink, washed through with layers of green and tan. Its caterpillars are also striking, but in a different way. They may resemble the trunk of an elephant if you squint, but their most arresting quality is the large false eyes behind the head, which they wave coquettishly at you if they feel threatened.
I’m not walking on wasteland. It’s a field by the river Mersey, transected by dog walkers’ paths and desire lines. In a few months time there will be nothing here but grass and dead stalks, all of the willowherb dying back to almost nothing, but today there is an endless, swaying sea of pink. To my altered eyes it’s even more vivid than usual, and the wind shakes through them like a field of long grass, ripples and undulations spreading and doubling back. It is hypnotic.
The other feature of rosebay willowherb is its fluffy seeds, which spread through the air like thistledown. They are still mostly in bloom, but there is a hint of autumn in the air too, and the first blossoms are turning to seed and drifting on the breeze, landing in my hair and brushing past my cheek.
I have an overwhelming urge to sit down amid the forest of swaying stems, lie on my back, look up into the canopy framing the blue sky beyond. But the sun is slow, and the ground still damp, and in either case I’ve been lucky to avoid dog walkers so far. It feels like happy chance to have been given a moment of solitude among the plants, but it isn’t going to last, and there is a note of paranoia humming in my chest. There often is when I trip. Certainly during the most intense part, as the poison creeps through my nervous system, making my skin tingle and sounds amplify and echo, becoming sharp and clattering as they swing in and out of conscious notice.
When I took mushrooms in Conwy I contrived to become lost just at the tipping point — the moment at which you set an ugly tone for the rest of the trip by becoming panicky, paranoid or afraid. I conducted two loops of the area around Pensychnant, the country home of a Victorian mill owner, since turned into a café and nature reserve, hoping to find my way to the footpath which would take me into Snowdonia. There was a long wooded drive down to the manor house, shaded by massive old beech trees and a looming, moss-covered wall. Trying to concentrate, I took out my headphones, but instead of the textures of Julianna Barwick all I could hear now was my heavy breathing, the scrape and squelch of tiny stones and dead leaves under my shoes, snatches of distant conversation from the car park as families decamped for a day away from the seagulls.
Rushing to get out of the oppressive gloom, the scratching of my footsteps in my ears, I almost walked in front of a car.
Five minutes later I found the path, left the road and the tourists and the damp woodland behind, and pink hills — of heather, this time — rose up before me and washed my brain clean.
#
I’m writing this all down to remember it. This is the danger of travelling alone. Your memories start and end inside your own head, and if you’re prone to forgetfulness then eventually they all just wash away. I don’t think they’re permanently gone. Sometimes they’ll come to me in a flash, like the field and the rosebay willowherb. Mostly not.
It’s hard to know why I have a bad memory, though there are several culprits. ADHD, depression, periods of extremely heavy drinking (use of the ‘A’ word implied but rarely expressed) and drug use. There was about a week at university where I was later told that my closest friends were seriously concerned I had given myself brain damage, though both studied politics rather than neurology. I’m fairly sure that my weak bladder is the result of doing too much ketamine, but maybe I spent a lot of time in the toilet pre-ket too.
There’s nobody who will tell me one way or the other, and I can’t remember.
Recording a memory doesn’t save it either though. Oh, it saves something, but my recollections are already abstracted from what I experienced, and now as I write it down as an essay it passes through another filter, one where I am selective with details. In time this filtered version will become the memory, as the actual one fades and is replaced by this story that I’ve stuck in place, pinned like a dead moth rather than in full, frantic motion.
That’s the big secret of memory: it doesn’t work. It’s why police interrogations are a scam. It’s why you say “No Comment”. It’s why people come to believe the most profoundly untrue things about their experiences, because they have moulded and shaped and toyed with their recollection like a potter until it takes a recognisable form — but once it was just mud.
In Conwy I read The Killing of an Elephant and other essays by George Orwell, in which he recalls at great length his schooldays, his time as a colonial policeman in Burma, of fighting against Franco in the Spanish civil war. Was Orwell making a record of these experiences at the time, or is it natural to him to recall them exactly so, as if they were trapped in amber?
I wonder if I will ever be capable of true memoir that doesn’t take the form of tweets. Several times I have found myself searching keywords in my own social media posts to try and recall an event that happened to me, having outsourced my memory to Elon Musk, who is not a safe custodian. I have become one of those elderly men so dependent on their wives that they no longer bother trying to know anything themselves. I have two thousand wives, and I have not been a good husband.
Later, back home and looking up the essays on Wikipedia, I learn that Orwell was accused of making them all up. Memories are liars, but none more so than the memories of writers.
In either case, there is memory and then there is memory. There are the hazy, twisted, biased recollections of the things that happened to you, and then there is the path which remembers the dog walkers. It’s hard to know what imprint the pink fields of rosebay willowherb left on me, but you have to hope there is something, because what is the point of beauty otherwise? Even if it’s just a tiny, incremental reminder that life is worth living and summer will come around again.
#
Later, after the field, as the mushrooms faded and my aches sharpened, I sat outside a pub in Chorlton Green scrolling on my phone and listening to a Terry Pratchett audiobook. Trips have a dreamlike quality to them anyway, especially when conducted alone, down narrow, overgrown footpaths. They have a sense of going somewhere, of forward motion, of being carried along by some narrative or other, but it’s hard to say what it is. Only that somewhere in your churning brain there is an idea of the way that things should go, and of a natural progression of events.
Pratchett called this ‘narrative causality’. The theory that everything that we are and everything that exists is constituted of stories. In one sense it is very obviously, superficially true. Stories are human things, and we tell them about ourselves. It is the most natural thing in the world to see the shape of things and understand that they are meaningful because they are happening to us.
This is how I have come to think of memory. Not as a direct window into the past, but the things which show us the shape of the world.
It’s October now, and the dieback is beginning. But up above the splintered stems and damp earth, just outside of perception, there is a drifting haze of pink.
